This weekend having just replaced my five-year-old PCIE2.0 ARECA RAID card with an ARC-1883ix-16, I had a couple of pleasant experiences and one odd result.

The good news being the existing RAID configuration remained intact, so no restoring from the backup drives was necessary. Also, the read speed of the existing RAID configuration (i.e. eight 2TB HDs) far exceeded my expectations in that it is more than eight times faster than the previous hardware provided. However, the write speed is about 20% less

Can't seem to past the CrystalDiskMark results so here they are in type:

Seq Q32T1 Read 5822, Write 429.5

4K Q32T1 Read 529.7. Write 3.002

Seq Read 3756 Write 67.32

4K Read 152.1 Write 0.333

The Read performance is totally unexpected, and offset by the rather disappointing write speeds... Do any of you with similar cards have experienced this?

One of the reasons for acquiring this card is Harm's fault, after reading his paper on Cashing SSD RAID drives, I just had to build one for myself Four SSDs are ready and just waiting for a SFF8643 to x4 SATA HDD cable to arrive.

Increasing the onboard memory on the ARC1883ix dramatically improves the write performance of the RAID drives, even with the write test exceeding the on board memory (in this case 8GB). Note, tests performed below the onboard memory shows inaccurately high performance.

The not so good:

The Battery Backup (ARC1883BAT) slows access to the arrays - see the test results below -

These are the results of the CrystalDisk tests with the BBU installed (this array consists of four Samsung SSD 850 Pro in RAID 0)

BTW, attempts to perform this test at 32GiB took too long to wait for

Next is the same test with the BBU removed and at 32GiB

The following is the response received from ARECA technology tech-support division:

"Regarding the performance, it is normal that array have less performance when battery connected.